Assume humankind is on a timeline in which interstellar space travel is inevitable. Where do you think we are on that continuum (based on time and/or technological advancement?) Are we closer to our early human cave-dwelling ancestors or Starfleet Command?
Assuming it ever happens we are definitely closer to space travelers than cavemen. If it ever happens it will certainly happen in the next several hundred years, not the next several thousand or 10’s of thousand (depending on your definition of ‘cavemen’).
(My emphasis.)
So, we’re either closer to interstellar space travel…or we’re not. 
It matters if we’re discussing FTL or sublight. It is possible that FTL travel is going to be literally impossible in our universe, no matter how technologically advanced H.sap. (or her descendants) become. OTOH, if people like Elon Musk have their way, we could have slowships en route to other stars in the next century or two.
My gut says that we will never see Starfleet, nor even an ansible. But I expect we will seed other worlds in less than a millennium.
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We are both. There is no significant difference between us and Cro-Magnons, nor between our star-travelling descendants and us.
I think he means technologically. Could be wrong and misreading the OP, but that’s my take.
Right, but the OP is (again, my reading) asking us to assume that we DO figure out FTL (or maybe long duration sleeper type ships or whatever magic tech takes us to the stars) and then extrapolate from there. My read is the OP is asking if it would be 10’s of years, 100’s of years, 1000’s of years or 10000s of thousands of years IF it is inevitable…and my answer is that if it could be solved by us, that we are on the curve to do that in the short term, not the long term. Lots of caveats of course. 
Setting aside the “caveman” misnomer, the o.p. proposes two very different standards of comparison, to wit, a time scale and “technological advancement”, which have very different criteria. On the former, I think we’re clearly closer to being spacefaring than prehistoric populations and certainly pre-modern humans. Even a pessimistic view of space exploration and advancement will likely have permanent, self-sustaining habitats within a few centuries if not sooner, if for no other reason than a need for new resrouces and energy sources. Relatively crude habitats but servicesable could be constructed with extant technology (carbon fiber, reflective solar collectors, fiber optics) and using materials found in space in relatively unprocessed form (water ice, carbonates, silicates) which would sufficiently replicate terrestrial conditions (simulated gravity, sunlight, hydrologic cycle, radiation shielding) to allow for permanent populations that sustain themselves by exploiting solar energy and space resources.
However, at the current state of the art we cannot even “live” sustainably in the environmental extremes of our own planet despite being evolved to live here. Long term habitation and certainly travel through interplanetary and eventually interstellar space will require fundamental advances in science and technology, including propulsion, energy production, self-reparing and autonomous “robotic” systems, management of complex habitation and thermal systems, biological modification, et cetera. Indeed, to be truly capable of inhabiting space, rather than just viewing from the protective cocoon of a spacecraft, human beings will have to reshape themselves (or their successors which carry on the essential ethical and intellectual values and history) in a form that can live in space directory, tolerating vacuum, radiation, temperature extremes, et cetera. In terms of technological advancement, we’re really just a few ticks away from banging rocks together to start a fire, and it wouldn’t take much to put us nearly back to that level.
Stranger
Yah. And I do agree the first assumption in the OP: that interstellar travel is inevitable. And I absolutely agree with you that it’s in the (relatively) short term. Just not FTL.
(ETA: This was in response to XT.)
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I’m confused. If you think FLT isn’t going to happen. And Voyager for example is still 80,000 years from reaching the next star, how do you envision interstellar travel happening?
Well, there are plenty of SciFi answers to this. Say, something like the Alcubierre drive (that’s popular atm with SciFi writers). Technically, you aren’t going faster than the speed of light withing the space frame you are in, but looked at from an outside space frame you seem to be moving at many times the speed of light. Or there are the ever popular wormholes.
You don’t have to go nearly the speed of light to cut travel times down to less than your 80k years to reach the next star btw. An Orion drive, something we COULD (perhaps) do, could cut the travel time down to a few hundred years (assuming you could keep the crew alive and solve a host of critical issues first :p).
Slowships.
Remember that VGER is barely ticking along, relatively speaking (NASA tells me it’s moving at a paltry 57,600 km/h), and of course is not accelerating.
(I’m handwaving here, so please forgive me.) Using only tech we have right now, we could probably put together an interstellar probe that could accelerate to two or three percent of C. That would get the probe to A. Centauri in around a century, century and a half. It would be expensive as all hell, of course, and probably shitting hard radiation all over the place, but we could do it.
We get nuclear thermal rocket technology running, and .1c is not IMO out of the question, which cuts travel time to 40 years. I don’t see any problem getting volunteers for that trip. Fusion rockets cut it further. Then we get into magsails, ion scoops, Bussard ramjets…
AFAIC, knowing that we can get to another star in a human lifetime or two means that the rest is merely refinement.
(ETA: And also, what XT said. I’m not even considering wormholes or Alcubierre drives…I’m crazy, but not Elon Musk crazy. :D)
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You have the crux of my question right. The primary part of the question has to do with the technology rather than the timeframe. Is our current technological capability closer to FTL spacecraft or using clubs to kill for food.
Ah. That’s a tremendously difficult question. The answer (again, IMHO) is either “much closer to FTL travel” (if FTL is even possible), or “infinitely closer to using clubs” (if FTL is fundamentally impossible).
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Exploration and habitation of interplanetary space may be assessed as feasible with substantial advances in technology based upon known physical principles, e.g. using nuclear thermal or fission fragment, nuclear electric, fusion-driven plasma, or even the crude but workable nuclear pulse propulsion i.e. Project ORION) methods of propulsion. With such means the resources of the entire solar system are accessible within weeks or months rather than the years it currently takes us to send uncrewed probes to other planets.
Interstellar transit will require either fundamental advances in basic physics (e.g. benign wormholes, “hyperspace” (extradimensional transforms or through compactified dimensions), gravity control, control of exotic matter capable of producing negative energy), modification of humanity to a non-organic form capable of sustained low energy function for indefinite periods (millenia), or both. It isn’t realistic to talk of travelling interstellar distances at this point because we don’t even know what breakthroughs may be practicable or even physically possible at this point. We may very likely explore the galaxy, if at all, by proxy with something akin to Dyson’s “Astrochicken”, and certainly not in the ways portrayed in most science fiction.
Stranger
ON another message board this guy keeps popping up claiming he was born in the future and that 2088 is the year when time travel forward and backward will be reached. From ther oine could go anywhen if what he is saying were true.
By a measure of technological development, we are closer to cavemen than we are to the world our own children will inhabit. What’s more, this has always been true, for every generation.
Given genetic engineering and cybernetic implants, this may not be true.
Its quite an assumption that interstellar space travel is inevitable. Based upon what we know, it may not be technically feasible.
The real question, though, is how close are we to space traveling cave men?
Faster-than-light space travel is probably impossible. But interstellar travel is just an engineering problem. As noted, we’ve already sent unmanned craft off on interstellar missions.
Given that in any space or planetary habitation scenario the population will have to burrow under or within a significant mass in order to attenuate cosmic and solar radiation as a substitute for Earth’s thick protective atmosphere, we can expect space inhabitants in the foreseeable future to all be “cavemen” and “cavewomen”.
Stating that “interstellar travel is just an engineering problem” belies the reality of what an incredibly difficult problem it is. Yes, it is true that the Voyager and Pioneer probes have or will leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. However, they’re not directed at any other star and will not be functional at the point at which they could even reach the nearest star. Making even an unmanned probe that could survive the conditions and for the duration to transit to another star is well beyond any current capability and experience regardless of budget or effort applied, and making a vessel which could carry and sustain a human population to that distance is pure fantasy at this point. Even setting aside the difficulties with propulsion, energy production, and consumables, the concept is limited by basic thermodynamics, i.e. the ability to reject the amount of waste heat that is an inevitable consequence of maintaining a large habitat is beyond current technology.
Stranger